Monday, August 14, 2017

Facebook has launched a video uploading and streaming platform called "Facebook Watch" to compete and rival popular YouTube but do you think Facebook can displace YouTube in the video business? Only time will tell.
As with YouTube, there will be some shows produced professionally by corporate partners—including one live MLB game per week—but the company says the focus will be on videos uploaded by Facebook users. Now, here is why I think that Facebook Watch is more of a Twitter competitor than a YouTube competitor and why it won’t pose a serious threat to YouTube anytime soon:

According to the info, Facebook has a new home for original video content produced exclusively for it by partners, who will earn 55 percent of ad break revenue while Facebook keeps 45 percent. The “Watch” tab and several dozen original shows will start rolling out to a small group of U.S. users tomorrow on mobile, desktop and Facebook’s TV apps.

By hosting original programming, Facebook could boost ad revenue and give people a reason to frequently return to the News Feed for content they can’t get anywhere else.

Watch features personalized recommendations of live and recorded shows to watch, plus categories like “Most Talked About,” “What’s Making People Laugh” and “Shows Your Friends Are Watching.” Publishers can also share their shows to the News Feed to help people discover them. A Watchlist feature lets you subscribe to updates on new episodes of your favorite shows. Fans can connect with each other and creators through a new feature that links shows to Groups.

Facebook says it plans to roll out access to Watch to more users and more content creators soon, starting with the rest of the U.S. before expanding internationally. Users with access will see a TV-shaped Watch button in the bottom navigation bar of Facebook’s main app that opens the new video hub.

Facebook admits that “we’ve also funded some shows” as examples, but notes that these are only a small percentage of all the available shows. “We want any publisher/creator who is interested to be able to create a show in the future,” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. “So there will be hundreds of shows at launch, and we’ll hopefully scale to thousands.”

Business Insider reported some leaked details about the redesign earlier today, but pegged the launch of original programming as starting August 28th, when the shows actually will begin to roll out tomorrow.

What is the first platform you think of when you want to watch a skit? Obviously: Instagram.
However, what is the first platform that comes to mind when you want to watch a music video?
Or a tech review?
Or a Vlog?
Can you see where am I going to with this?

It will be very difficult for Facebook Watch to change the existing behavioral pattern. Difficult, but not impossible. So it should be fun to watch Facebook try to replicate what it did with Snapchat on YouTube.

Facebook is rolling out a new featurethat allows brands to promote third-party influencer content in the feed—a move that experts say is likely to give influencer marketing as we know it a higher price tag.Influencer marketing has become a mainstream strategy from driving earned media via trusted experts within niche categories like beauty, fitness, and food. One study found that as high as 86 percent of marketersare utilizing it, with half of them planning to up their investment year-over-year.At the surface, the update will allow brands to extend the benefits their influencer partnerships to targeted audiences at scale. Instead of simply reaching the influencer’s following, for example, they can boost the content to new and different audiences to their liking.How does it work? Pretty easily, actually. A creator writes a post, tags the page using the branded content tool, and checks a permission box signifying the advertiser can promote the post. The creator can then share the content, by clicking “Boost Post,” as it appears on their Page.It’s up to advertisers to boost the content and they’ll have the authority to hand-pick and authorize who can tag them, to protect their brand from being misrepresented. Marketers will also gain access to critical specs surrounding the content such as reach, engagement, total spend, and CPM to gauge performance, which is a big deal for practitioners who have been struggling to measure the success of their influencer marketing campaigns.Of course, this pretty much defeats the entire purpose of influencer marketing, which is to earn attention from a subject matter expert’s active and engaged audience, which that influencer has groomed and amassed around a specific and relevant topic or category.So, what does it all mean?*.It’s not far-fetched to assumeFacebook will tweak its algorithmto make it harder for influencer content to stand out on its own, especially if that content is tagged with a brand partner. Looking back at the history of Facebook, this is exactly what happened to brands once they began to amass large audiences there.*.Influencers could lose some leverage.Since brands can control the reach of the content with their media dollars, and if an algorithm update indeed kicks in, brands could try to negotiate influencer rates down to avoid paying double for the influencer’s content likeness as well as the media spend on top of that.*.Having a huge audience will no longer cut it.Influencer marketing has ballooned to the point where there are plentiful opportunities for anyone with a sizable following to make a buck or two. With this update, the bar will be raised and there will be a higher premium paid for brand recognition (“celebrity” status) and/or content creation skills.This update has sparked many questions around the future of influencer marketing on Facebook (and elsewhere). The next terrain to watch will be Instagram, which has emerged as the No. 1 channel for influencer marketing in many verticals and is, of course, owned by Facebook.